If you’re ever in need of a quick and professional 3d object design, you should definitely check out Milan Antovics’ portfolio.
This guy made me a logo to my exact specifications within hours of me asking, all the way through the process he sent me updates (usually within a couple of minutes of providing details) and was able to send me every kind of format of picture that I could want.

Here’s the final design.

Awesome! You can see more examples of Milans 3d work at his 3D Portfolio Site and in most cases, you should be able to get a completed project done for less than 100 USD! how’s that for value?!

I got in contact with Milan initially through GetaFreelancer.

I have used GAF before and I have found it to be very easy to post a project, within minutes of being posted there were quite a few responses and bids from prospective freelancers. You have your own private message board so you can stay in touch with each freelancer.

When you have someone you want to do the work, you put the fee into escrow ready to release when the project is finished.

Easy peasy freelancing!

Popularity: 8% [?]

I am familiar with a lot of the outsourcing and freelancer sites as I use a lot of external help for work related projects. I don’t mind using them, I’ve done business with some very talented people for a much nicer fee than if I went closer to home. It’s a bit hit and miss sometimes though but for the cost of a few hundred dollars I find that I can get a few example images/logos/websites to use to pull the client over the edge and commit to getting the work done by my company.

I thought I’d try an experiment here to see what kind of talent browses past this blog. Read the description below and if you are familiar with designing logos or corporate images, leave a comment or contact me with a low resolution image of your design and the best one will receive the job and payment.

Logo Design Tender

Budget: up to 150 USD

Description: Take the image below and use it as a basis for creating a logo with a technical/modern/computer look. The image will be used as a logo on company stationary, online and in promotional literature. The image will need to be provided in 300dpi format as JPEG, PSD or PNG.

Ideas:

• Take the image and mold it to a shield
• Make half the image in wireframe
• Render the image as 3d at an angle
• All of the above

Provided Artwork:

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Terms & Conditions:
This is just an experiment (hence the sub 200$ budget) to see what ideas people can come up with, the best logo may be used as a corporate image on stationary or online, it depends on how good it is!. If none of the images are considered worthy of being used, the best one will receive a ‘prize’ of 50 USD as a consolation. The cost of your image may be used as a factor in deciding the winner. If your image is deemed the winner and you receive payment, the image will be considered as sold and owned by the payer (as with normal outsourcing/freelance work).

Please use the contact form or leave a comment below with a URL to your low resolution image (to prevent me or others from stealing your image without paying!) and your bid in US Dollars

good luck!

Popularity: 3% [?]

I am so excited! This weekend there will be some changes to FiddyP.

I am having a theme professionally designed by an Indonesian designer and it’s looking really good! It’ll have curved corners, drop shadows and double span sidebars hovering over two fixed height sidebars! yey.

The guys name is Sunaryo and I am most impressed with his ability, he has been able to create a fantastic theme based on a screen grab I made of a theme I liked. I gave him a bit of a headache by asking for all sorts of extras like a double sidebar with double span divs and to top it all, a single sidebar’d single post page and more. I’ve seen a great mockup picture and there’s even a demo of it working, coded completely from scratch from a jpeg image. awesome.

here’s a little peek of the main page..

and one of the single post page..

Why a single post page with only one sidebar? Well, I wanted to do things backwards. I know the general rule is to plaster your adverts on single post pages as they are the ones that get linked to by the search engines but on a few blogs that I have seen, I have really liked a single post page that has just the information on it and not too many flashy things saying “buy me!” it encouraged me to look around the blog a bit more to see what’s there.

This is what I want to do with FiddyP;

• I want to provide valuable information in a format that will be easy on the eyes with a little bit of personality thrown in.
• Provide a ‘fun’ place to go to read tutorials and learn things that can make life easier
• Run contests that encourage community participation
• Throw the limelight on other blogs that I particularly like
• Have a series of posts that run concurrently like an AJAX series of tutorials taking someone from ‘hello world’ to a fully functional useful plugin
• Regular guest spots for writers with talent
• Real reviews of products that I use, not just kiss-arsey-buy-it-so-I-earn reviews, good ones that also mention bad points!
• more… MORE!

I hope to have something up by the weekend (oo-er!) so if you visit, please be patient while I tweak, tweak, tweak!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Wow! what a busy week I have just had, I have barely been able to keep up with comments here and I’ve sorely neglected my blogging brethren by not popping in for a cup of tea, sorry about that everyone but I’ve been busy with some commercial projects for work which turned out to be great fun!

I have been working on some ecommerce sites and CMS scripts to get a ‘proof of concept’ site up for a client and it went really well, one of the proofs turned out so well that I think it may become the one that we use! (that’ll save some time when it comes to launch day!)

Part of the ecommerce research I did to see what would work led me to trying lots of different things, one of them being a simple wordpress theme with an added shopping cart which turned out to be a very simple and cheap solution. It worked really well and was up and running in a couple of hours so that got me thinking about writing a series of posts later explaining how to sell products direct from your blog with the minimum amount of fuss.

I also bought a book about AJAX called “The AJAX construction kit”. I bought it after browsing through it’s pages in the local book shop, a nice place where you can sit down and read through any of the books on display before you buy…. or do as I do and use the free wifi provided to get my PDA online and type in the ISBN number on Amazon and then order it for 1/3 of the price of the shop! (teehee)

So far it’s been a great read and I particularly like the way it teaches you how to do things with the construction kit rather than try and teach you every single nut and bolt of Javascript and PHP. It’s a much better way to learn how to get AJAX scripts running on your site and I can see some very useful plugins coming this way when I’ve finished the book. In fact, a way to get me to read more will be to share what I learn with a series of AJAX tutorials here!

I am also considering getting a professional redesign done for here, I think a few hundred dollars will get me a fine looking site. I’m not even sure what I want yet and I had to abandon my idea of doing it all myself since the new work projects came in. Anyone out there use a professional designer and could recommend them?

Popularity: 3% [?]